Later this week, I will be posting about whom I’m supporting at the federal, state, and local elections. In the meantime, I’ve revisited my reasons for supporting Barack Obama four years ago. Here’s the money quote from that post:

I am supporting Barack Obama for president. Why? Because Obama has so many of the qualities that we need in a president. He is committed to uniting the country around a vision for the future, he is committed to foreign diplomacy rather than empty posturing, he plays politics by a different and more noble playbook.

You can read the rest here: Why Obama?. And you can tell me if you think I made the right choice. I still have faith in the president. But I was sure that Hillary would have been too divisive, and now I’m not so sure…

I will say that based on John McCain’s last few FOX News appearances, I am damn glad that he is not our president.

This morning, Andrew Sullivan penned what I think is a devastating post about Mitt Romney’s Mormonism. In short, Neither Mitt nor Anne nor his parents spoke against their church when it was rabidly racist for decades. Mitt claims that his parents wept with joy when a “new revelation” led church leaders to begin including African-Americans in the 1970s, but what led him to stay so silent for so long?

As Sullivan notes, all churches have their dark histories. But even the powerful and relatively monolithic Catholic Church — to which Sullivan belongs — allows for public dissent. Just drive around Minneapolis this week and see the lawnsigns that read, “Another Catholic Voting No,” in direct defiance of the stated position of the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis on the marriage amendment.

It may seem the height of irony, or maybe a double standard. Last night I listened to the third presidential debate as I drove home from a successful pheasant hunt in South Dakota. In my cooler were nine birds — birds that I had shot, that my dog had retrieved to me in his mouth, and that I had cleaned by hand. It’s a bloody business, hunting; admittedly violent.

And yet, as I drove home and listened to our president and his challenger talk about killing people, it just seemed to me that they were altogether nonchalant about it: